Providing systems that enable users to enjoy audio/visual content regardless of time and place has been a universal goal in the consumer electronics industry for many years. The most conventional approach is to use some type of removable media on which content is stored, and a user can play the content back at any place where a compatible player is available. These removable media include magnetic tape cassettes, optical discs such as CDs and DVDs, and semiconductor memories. This approach has the advantage of being intuitive and straightforward, and most users are already familiar with it.
Recent technical developments, however, are raising some issues with the approach of providing content on removable media. One relates to the expanding volume of data. As the range of content and its data volume increases, greater capacity is required for media, and the time to transfer content onto the media tends to increase. To overcome this problem, new types of media are regularly introduced, but this renders older formats (and their players) obsolete.
Another issue is digital rights management. Since digitized data is easily copied without degradation, elaborate technology is required to prevent unlimited copies from being made.
The present invention recognizes that content provision systems that do not use removable media, such as networks, are also in widespread use and avoid some of the problems noted above. Specifically, in a networked system, a user can retrieve content that is stored in a remote device, have it transferred to another device, and play it back remotely. The user is not forced to copy the content to removable media or to buy removable media. The advantage to networks is that the number of servers and clients is flexible, and a user can access any content in a server from any client in the same network without using removable media.
As further understood herein, however, networks such as home networks are not without their own peculiar drawbacks. For instance, in a household that shares the same server(s) storing a wide variety of content for each family member, when one user wishes to use part of the library, he must obtain a list of the content and then select the desired content. Because it would be inconvenient to go through this process every time, a user may create some sort of “user account” or “category holder” and associate favorite content beforehand, and the groupings are stored in the server. In a client device sought to be used as a player, the user can input the account or holder name to access the data in the server, or search it using a graphical user interface. The user may also input a password, because access to some content must be limited due to parental control, etc.
The present invention critically recognizes that in such networks, the client device (player) must have a user interface such as a keyboard and display so that the user can see a list of the content, confirm choices, and input an account name or password. This kind of approach is reminiscent of a computer network system, in which keyboards and monitors are common and users are presumed to be familiar with such computer-oriented operations, but in consumer electronic systems, such a presumption is not always valid. Accordingly, a networked system such as the type discussed above may not be not perceived to be user-friendly for all the family members.
Moreover, privacy protection and access control can be problematic in networked systems, because the range of the signal may not be limited to within the user's immediate area, thus potentially being captured by an eavesdropper. The content stream can of course be scrambled or encrypted before it is output, but this typically requires delivery of an encryption key, which typically is input manually into at least some of the system client devices and, thus, again implicates computer skills. Thus, the current PC-like approach in consumer electronic network systems often spoils the ease of use for many users, who nonetheless remain familiar with the intuitive solution of removable media, in which access to content is limited simply to those who actually possess the media. Having made these critical observations, the invention herein is provided.